Three Days Grace: How An Unprecedented Reunion Brought Them Back to the Top of the Rock Charts

Three Days Grace have entered a new era, and it might just be the biggest of their career.

The band’s song “Mayday” is the No. 1 song on the year-end 2025 Billboard Canada Mainstream Rock chart — a major feat for a group that’s been making music together for well over two decades.

“It’s still so surreal to me that we’ve been around for as long as we have been, and we’ve continuously put out albums that resonate with people.” says Adam Gontier on a Zoom with Billboard Canada. 

On the same call, his bandmate and fellow lead singer Matt Walst agrees. 

“It’s pretty crazy that more than two decades after the first song was released, we’d have a song that was the No. 1 song in rock in Canada.” 

When it comes to 2025 achievements, that’s just one of many for Three Days Grace.

In the U.S., the band has just scored their 20th Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay No. 1 with “Kill Me Fast,” putting them just one behind Shinedown for the most of all time. Three different songs from their 2025 album Alienation have gone to No. 1.

Their 2003 hit “I Hate Everything About You,” meanwhile, entered Spotify’s Billions Club with more than one billion streams. The band reunited with original lead singer Adam Gontier, and their new reunion tour is selling out arenas across the world. 

That’s not something any of the band members would have predicted. Their current wave of rock chart dominance comes after a musical and personal gamble few bands have attempted, and even fewer have done successfully: the decision to power up with both of their lead singers. 

Three Days Grace first formed in the ‘90s after Gontier and drummer Neil Sanderson met as ninth graders in high school in the small rural town of Norwood, Ontario. 

“As soon as I heard him open his mouth and sing, I was like, I want to be in a band with that guy,” remembers Sanderson. 

After an earlier incarnation as a band called Groundswell, the band regrouped with bassist Brad Walst to become a rock trio called Three Days Grace. 

Brad’s younger brother, Matt, wasn’t in the band yet — but he was nearby and watching closely. Then only 8 or 9 years old, he grew up around the rise of Three Days Grace and it awakened his own rock star aspirations. 

“They’d jam in the basement,” he remembers. “Our neighbors, the Partytons, they’d have parties in the backyard, and one of the first shows [Three Days Grace] played was on a hay wagon. I watched them go from playing that hay wagon to playing arenas.”

The three-piece Three Days Grace moved into what Sanderson calls “this really decrepit basement apartment” in Toronto as teenagers to pursue the band full time. 

Matt co-wrote the songs “Scared” and “Let You Down” on Three Days Grace’s 2003 self-titled debut album and auditioned for the band as a teenager shortly after, playing guitar without a pick until his finger bled. But he lost the gig to lead guitarist Barry Stock, who he admits had much better chops than him. “There’s no comparison,” he laughs now. “Barry’s a monster guitar player.”

Instead, Matt formed his own band, My Darkest Days, who were soon discovered by Chad Kroeger and signed to his label, 604 Records. The band had some success of their own, with the 2010 song “Porn Star Dancing” hitting No. 40 on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100. 

Meanwhile, things were picking up for Three Days Grace. The band’s angst-filled songs like “I Hate Everything About You,” “Just Like You” and “Never Too Late” and “Animal I Have Become” from their follow-up album, 2006’s One-X, were all charting and building the band a dedicated following of young diehard fans. 

The band signed a record deal in 2001, right before Napster disrupted the music industry and began the digital music revolution. Breaking through on rock radio was still a major goal. 

Gontier remembers growing up listening to seminal CanRock bands on the radio, like Matthew Good Band, Our Lady Peace, The Tea Party and The Tragically Hip. But they made a conscious choice to sign with an American label and push to make sure their music would also break through outside of Canada — a big reason why they’re still playing throughout the world now.  

“We put in a lot of hard work, touring nonstop for years at a time, but if we didn’t have that support from radio, who knows where we’d be now?” says Gontier. 

Sanderson says the band doesn’t take the support for granted. It’s a major reason why they could go across America, and crowds would know every word to every song. “We still call the program directors and thank them for playing our music,” he says. 

But it wasn’t just the airplay, Sanderson theorizes. It was the honesty and authenticity of their music, which brings cathartic rock riffs and throat-shattering hooks to everyday struggles that audiences can relate to: anxiety, breakups, struggles with mental health and depression. 

“We hear all the time that people thought that they were the only ones that felt a certain way until they listened to one of our songs describing how they feel,” he says proudly. “Sometimes we hear that we have songs that saved people’s lives. As an artist that’s aiming for the greatest good, there’s no better feeling than that.”

In 2013, everything changed. The band was at a commercial peak and touring their third album, Transit of Venus, but Gontier was feeling exhausted. 

“The amount of work we were doing, paired with my emotional state at the time — I needed to take a break,” he reflects now. “Basically every aspect of my life was in chaos. I had to back out and do the one thing that I thought at the time was going to help me.”

Gontier, who had semi-public struggles with addiction and mental health struggles, made an abrupt decision to leave the band.  

His unexpected exit left a massive void that needed to be filled immediately. Three Days Grace turned to a familiar face: Matt Walst. Matt joined the band he once auditioned for, and brought them into a new incarnation.

While Gontier’s raw, anguished grit defined the band’s early intense post-grunge sound, Matt brought a slightly more melodic tone that helped evolve the sound of Three Days Grace into its next era, including albums like Human and Outsider and another string of No. 1 Mainstream Rock hits. 

Despite the major overhaul, the band continued as one of the biggest rock bands of the 2010s into the 2020s.

Gontier formed his own band, Saint Asonia, and continued to find success on his own terms, but many fans still held out hope he might one day return to Three Days Grace. 

One day Sanderson and Gontier decided it was time to put the past behind them and meet for a coffee in Gontier’s home base of Nashville. They started reminiscing about old times and realized many of the old wounds had started to scab. 

“Things change and people change, and the things that you thought mattered don’t anymore,” explains Gontier now. 

They made a plan. In 2023, Gontier joined Three Days Grace for a surprise appearance that was initially intended to be a one-off. But it went even better than either of them expected.

“We just saw the look in the eyes of the crowd,” recalls Sanderson. “We were like, okay, this is exciting.”

Matt Walst agreed to the potential of Gontier’s return. But instead of Gontier reclaiming his spot as the lead singer, they’d keep both singers and forge on as a five-piece mega-band.

Their managers were a little more cautious. They said they would only get behind if they proved they could still get in a room and write a song together. 

So, they did the same thing they did when they started the band. They grabbed their acoustic guitars, sat around a campfire, and jammed — this time at Stock’s estate in Southern Indiana. 

“We’re all small-town country kids that would have bonfires and play guitars,” Sanderson says, remembering how natural it all felt. “Within the first hour of landing, we had a song up and running.”

The song was “The Power.” With Adam Gontier and Matt Walst trading vocals, often line-by-line and harmonizing on the chorus, it shows the two-headed power of their new arrangement. 

“Mayday,” their 2025 Billboard Mainstream Rock-topping anthem, followed soon after. 

Alienation has brought Three Days Grace to new heights, including a current tour that’s taking them throughout the U.K., Canada, the United States, European countries like Turkey, Italy, France, Bulgaria, Germany, Switzerland and Czechia. “Next year is going to be our biggest year of touring — maybe ever,” says Sanderson. 

The new era coincides with a hot moment for rock bands of their era. The year-end Billboard Canada Rock charts are filled with their 2000s peers, from juggernauts like Breaking Benjamin, Linkin Park, Papa Roach and Evanescence to fellow Canadians like Finger Eleven, Big Wreck, Our Lady Peace and The Trews.

“My favorite band in ‘99 was Deftones, and now they’re the biggest they’ve ever been,” says Matt. 

Sanderson, who runs a production duo and record label called Judge & Jury with producer Howard Benson, has noticed it too. He’s signed acts like Alien Ant Farm, Hoobastank and Saliva — all bands who peaked in the 2000s and who continue to tour today. 

“The state of rock and roll is good,” he says. “I think people are looking for something that’s a little rough around the edges and a little dangerous, not perfectly tuned and perfect sounding. We don’t want to be perfect and I don’t think the fans want us to be perfect either. People want to hear the human in it.”

Now, Three Days Grace are playing for their fans of every era — and their children. While “I Hate Everything About You” has passed a billion streams on Spotify, and Gontier has noticed younger fans using the sound on TikTok. “I guess teenagers must still be breaking up with each other,” he jokes.

Their unique two-frontman dynamic makes the live show instantly compelling. Adam and Matt are not just trading songs; they are sharing vocals and singing harmonies, with each getting a chance to focus on guitar. Their ability to rest and switch roles means they can sustain the heavy touring schedule that will define their future. It’s like a greatest hits show every night. 

“I think that this new iteration is the best-ever version of Three Days Grace,” Sanderson says, declaring that it is their permanent lineup moving forward. “We’ve come full circle, and now we’re stronger than we’ve ever been.” 

This story originally appeared on Billboard Canada.